6 Marketing Techniques to Promote Your Small Business Online

What would you do if you woke up in the morning and your basement was flooded? If you are like millions of other people, you would grab your phone and look on Google for plumbers near me.

Then, as you know, you would be presented with a map and a list of the plumbers near you.

Now, think about what your small business does. If somebody in your area needs your products or services, it is presumable that you would want Google to include you in their searches. In order to make this happen, you have to sign up for Google plus and fill out all of your profile information, including your location.

Write a Press Release

Have you hired a new manager, opened a new location, or are you offering a new product or service? Are you planning to hold a significant sale? Are you launching a special loyalty program for customers, are you sponsoring a local sports team, or are you teaming up with a charity organization to hold an event?

If you have answered yes to any one of these questions, you should consider promoting your event using a press release.

You don’t need to be a large corporation who can get the attention of major media outlets to have press releases work for you. Chances are, you have numerous, small publications near you that are, essentially, advertising vehicles for local businesses combined with a few human interest stories.

You often see these publications offered for free on newsstands inside your local supermarkets. Even better, most of these publications are also published online, and they are always looking for content. Your press release could be turned into just the article they need to enrich their own content.

Design a Social Media Marketing Campaign

If you are using social media as a tool to make business announcements, interact with customers, share content, or as an informal customer service platform, that’s great. Why not take things a step further and create and execute a social media marketing campaign?

A social media campaign is one that is designed for a specific purpose. This could be to push a certain product or service, to target a specific customer persona, to generate buzz about an upcoming event, or to announce a big, upcoming change.

After you choose the focus of your campaign, you select the social media platforms for your campaign, create the content that you will use, and then choose your calls to action.

The great thing about social media, marketing campaigns is that they can be complicated and long-running (think ‘The Roaming Gnome’) or short and simple, e.g. a series of posts on various social media sites to get followers excited about a month end sale.

However, in any case, you want your campaign to generate engagement. This means that in addition to getting people to answer your CTA, you want them to comment and share your posts with others. One way that you can get people to do this is to add in some kind of incentive, such as entry into a drawing if they retweet your posts and use a specific hashtag.

Create a Series of Themed Videos

Creating video content is a great way to get customers to watch, engage, and share your content. One way you can do this is to release a series of themed videos that are between 3 and 5 minutes in length.

This time length is recommended because videos of that length are more likely to be viewed from beginning to end and then shared on social media. Here are some examples of themes that could be used:

Meet our team members

A behind the scenes look

Product demonstrations

How we got our start

How-to guides

Remember that our goal is to produce an easy watch, videos that your followers find to be entertaining, informative, or that helps them to solve a problem. Videos not only promote your small business, they help you to create a sense of trustworthiness with your followers.

Take a Look at Visual Social Media Platforms

If your products and services lend themselves to it, you may wish to consider become active on visual-based social media platforms such as Instagram, SnapChat, and Pinterest. With Instagram and SnapChat, you can share pictures of your products, tell SnapChat stories to demo products or give a more in-depth view of your brand.

You can also encourage your followers to share pictures of themselves using your products, or if it is more appropriate, doing things they enjoy doing because of the time or money you have saved them. You can also share images that you believe your followers will find touching, informative, or entertaining.

If you become active on Pinterest, you can create public boards containing pins with everything from project ideas related to your products to motivational images your followers will find inspiring.

Optimize Your Landing Pages

No matter where or how you promote your website, your ultimate goal is to get people to your landing pages. If you can do that, you are significantly closer to getting a macro conversion.

Unfortunately, the landing page is one part of the sales funnel where people drop out. Here are some tips to get your potential customers to answer that final CTA.

Use the same imagery and verbiage on your landing page that you used in your ad or social media post that leads to it.

Add a final incentive such as next 100 people scheduling a product demonstration receives a 25% discount

Conclusion

If you want to promote your small business online, there are many ways to do so. However, before you begin you must know exactly what you wish to accomplish, the audience you want to reach, and where your efforts are best spent.